The students found scraps of old newspaper in the house but were not able to find a date. All junior Kate Swann of Savannah was able to conclude was that the paper was from a time when neckties were selling for 12 cents apiece.

BRUNSWICK | If the adage beauty is only skin deep applies to houses, then some University of Georgia students are having to peel off several layers in a nearly 150-year-old house to see how the original looked.

The small group of historic preservation students are spending a “Maymester” at the Smith House, a family residence built around 1867 that was falling into ruin.

Mark Reinberger, the Ph.D. who coordinates Historic Preservation for UGa’s College of Environment and Design, has brought 20 groups to Glynn County. They’ve worked in Jekyll Island’s historic district, at Hofwyl-Broadfield State Historic Site and on other structures, but the Smith House is the oldest so far, Reinberger said.

He pointed out the original design, the front windows that reach to the floor, the ornate door and window casements and the wood-burning fireplace.

Stepping toward the back of the house, Reinberger said, “When you get in this middle section, things are distinctly simpler.’’

The walls in the front room are painted plaster, but those in the middle section have gone through several facelifts that sagged with age.

The walls appear to have started as painted wood paneling, then a layer of wallpaper was added followed by Sheetrock, another layer of wallpaper and finally fiberboard paneling.

“The front is more intact,’’ he said.

The very back of the house appears to be older and constructed better than the middle, all of which poses questions: Was it two houses joined in the middle, was it a single house with additions or none of the above.

There’s a spacious front porch, a side porch on the north side and a cypress shingle roof covered by tin.

Holding a piece of shingle that had been eroded by weather, Reinberger said the cypress roof may have been the original, that there is a lot of cypress wood in the house, but it will be hard to determine whether some things go back nearly 150 years.

“The house is a mystery. It’s not exactly clear how it was built. It’s just perfect for my class,’’ he said.

They have until Friday, the end of the Maymester, to solve the mystery and last week they carefully lifted a few of the thick floorboards and looked beneath for clues. There’s not enough crawl space to work under the house.

They found some old, graying scraps of newspapers although they had yet to make out a date last week. Kate Swann, a junior from Savannah, carefully examined the ragged pieces of newsprint searching for a date. She knows they’re old because there was an ad for men’s neckties for 12 cents each.

“All four in hand,’’ the ad said.

A newspaper figured into the house’s history, said Taylor Smith, president of the Brunswick Preservation Foundation, a recently formed organization that owns the house.

It’s called the Smith house because T.F. Smith bought the lot in 1867 and built a house there for his family, Taylor Smith said.

“T.F. Smith moved up from Florida in 1867. They were living here in 1868 and 1869,’’ Smith said. “They had maybe five children, then T.F. Smith died in 1874, I believe.”

He had been editor of the Brunswick Appeal, and his death of yellow fever was “a big to-do,’’ Smith said.

In 1889, his wife bought the adjacent lots, had two spec houses built and sold those, Smith said. The widow Smith left the house to two daughters, Josephine and Frances. Josephine died in 1945 and Frances, who died in 1960, left the house to her nurse. The nurse left it to her son, who later sold it to Neil Foster, who owns a real estate company and had used the house as rental property for a few years.

But the house was to the point it wasn’t economically feasible to repair, so it began going downhill. The lot grew up to the point that the house couldn’t be seen from Grant Street, which it faces.

To his credit, Foster gave the house to the foundation, the organization’s first, Smith said.

“We were right in front of the bulldozer,’’ Smith said.

The foundation will restore it and sell it but with a lot of covenants to ensure it is preserved, Smith said.

For the UGa students, the chance to spend a Maymester — as the hands-on early summer sessions are called — is an opportunity to get practical experience on what they hope to be their life’s work.

Part of it, however, is sheer drudgery. They have cut away trees and brush and made two enormous piles in front of the house. They filled a plastic tub with quart beer bottles and cans that were evidence of the property’s most recent use. They also found a lot of drug paraphernalia, Reinberger said.

They, along with Smith, are tearing out what passes for modern cabinets, peeling off the cheap paneling, taking down the drop ceiling and tearing an addition off the south end of the house.

“It sounded cool. I’m learning a lot,’’ Swann said.

And as a resident of Savannah, a city loaded with very old buildings, Swann said there’s a market for historic preservation back home.

“There’s a lot of hands-on work, and you get to say someday, ‘Hey, I did that,’ ’’ she said.

Rachel Haddon, who is working on her master’s in historic preservation, was sweeping broken glass from what may have been the living room.

“It’s great,’’ she said, ‘‘to see the bones, to see what was here.’’

There is also another mystery, a house fronted the back street that started small, said Katherine Croft, who sketched the house as the students found it.

“It looks like it had three additions. All the plumbing’s on the outside,’’ a hint that it was built before indoor plumbing was common, she said.

Andrew Stern was doing the dirty work of tearing away a small room in a corner formed by the front two rooms and the middle section.

“It’s tremendous,’’ Stern said from the top of a step ladder. “I’m glad we’re able to help get [the foundation] off the ground in one of their first few projects.”